You can tell pretty much everything you need to know about a game from its jump mechanics, whether it's contemporary Grand Theft Auto's slapstick tumble, the perfect bound in a Mario game or the cotton-soft float of Sackboy. The jump in Scram Kitty, a former Wii U exclusive that's now on its way to PS4 and Vita, was always a bit harder to read: a strange arc subject to the momentum you'd built up riding rails, and subject to the gravity of levels that would loop across the screen.

In that jump you'll see some of the impeccable taste of Scram Kitty's developer, Rhodri Broadbent, who worked at Lionhead and Q-Games before setting up Dakko Dakko. There's some of the inventiveness of Treasure, and the engineering precision of Nintendo. Its elasticity is initially unwieldy, which made it something of an acquired taste.

"It was made for people who like a challenge," Broadbent says over Skype as he prepares this week's release of Scram Kitty DX. "The thing is, we wanted to create a game that people who really wanted to master it could, and feel like they've achieved something, and that's exactly what we did and all the feedback suggests that. We didn't really take into consideration that a lot of people want to progress through a game without really mastering challenges, and that's fine - it's a different kind of game, and it meant some of the response was like 'whoa, this is a really hard game'. And fair enough, time is important to people and they don't want to spend it learning a crazy gravity system that's never been done before.

It seems like a long time ago we got excited about Torment: Tides of Numenera, the record-breaking Kickstarter game. Things were quiet in gaming back then, and bringing back beloved old games in new ways was exciting. But the world has moved on, new consoles launched, and similar kinds of nostalgic Kickstarter games eventually came out. Excitement naturally died down.

But as I talk to Torment creative lead Colin McComb, I remember why I was excited. It's because Planescape: Torment was different - that's the old game this new Torment thematically succeeds. It was deep on a philosophical level. 'What can change the nature of a man?' it asked as it pondered humanity and existence. Sure it had Dungeons & Dragons rules and a weird multiple universe setting, but they were almost beside the point. Torment: Tides of Numenera follows a similar path. 'What does one life matter?' it asks.

You're the suddenly-awoken consciousness of a body just abandoned by the Changing God. He's inhabited thousands of bodies like yours over aeons, seeing all he can of life while outrunning a fear of death, manifesting as an ancient enemy called The Sorrow. It usually kills the bodies he leaves. But not you. Now you're a key part of a battle and world you don't understand, trying to find your way. Sound familiar? How you get to the bottom of it all will be your journey.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-18-getting-re-excited-for-torment-tides-of-numenera
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1737616Wed, 18 Feb 2015 15:00:00 +0000How is the other new shooter from the creators of Halo?

Midnight Star isn't Halo on a tablet, but it plays a lot like it. You'll find yourself playing from a first-person view, shooting squat, comical aliens in the shadow of grand alien architecture, and you'll hear your efforts rewarded with shout-outs from a gruff American commentator: 'Double-kill', 'Triple-kill', 'Titanikill', 'Killzilla'.

More importantly, it's got the snap and fizz of Halo's arsenal transposed to a touchscreen - there's a tangible sense of weight as you drag the guns around the screen, a meaty boom when you pull the trigger of a shotgun and crunchy feedback when you headshot one of the bespectacled space-toads that serve as Midnight Star's grunts.

All of which makes perfect sense when you learn that Midnight Star is the debut game from Industrial Toys, a studio set up by Alex Seropian, one of the founders of Bungie, and its design lead is Paul Bertone, someone who filled that same role on Halo 2 before becoming lead mission designer on Halo 3. This is a game with enviable heritage.

In the sweat mist of a late 90s techno hall, Tetsuya Mizuguchi got his first glimpse of what would become his life's work. The young Japanese designer, still fresh from the success of creating one of Sega's biggest arcade hits, found himself on a balcony at Zurich's Street Parade - an offshoot of Berlin's celebrated Love Parade - watching out over a crowd lost to the rhythm. "This DJ is playing, and 100,000 people are moving with the music. The sound changed, and the movement changed. I watched from the top, and was like 'wow, what is this?'" What if you could play this, Mizuguchi thought to himself. What if he could turn this into a game?

It's an idea that still occupies Mizuguchi when I meet him in Tokyo, where we walk away from the sweltering mob of Roppongi towards its quieter back-streets and to the boardroom of the mobile game studio where he's currently consulting. Mizuguchi talks in fractured, thoughtful English, taking his time as he gathers his words; I've always found talking to him like one of those slow, stilted yet utterly engrossing conversations that takes place in the early hours while your ears are still ringing from the nightclub you've left behind.

Music is vital to Mizuguchi, of course, from the electronica spine of games such as Rez and Child of Eden through to the rhythmic puzzles of Lumines. As a teen in Otaru, on Japan's northern isle of Hokkaido, Mizuguchi became besotted with music television in its infancy, tuning in to MTV to get lost in the sugar punk of Cyndi Lauper, XTC, and Duran Duran. The language of the 80s music video, with their detached sense of cool and angular neon, would leave an imprint; at university, while studying media aesthetics, Mizuguchi took a Sony beta pro editor to his room where he'd tinker with his own video remix of Art of Noise's Paranoima.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1735516Sun, 08 Feb 2015 10:00:00 +0000So, what do you actually do in No Man's Sky?

"Space is big", wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space..."

It's a description that could not only apply to No Man's Sky, the enormous PlayStation 4 game being developed by the tiny Hello Games studio in Guildford, but also one that you sense would bring a smile to the lips of its likeable and loquacious lead, Sean Murray.

The Irishman introduced his game onstage at the last December's PlayStation Experience in Las Vegas by claiming if one of its procedurally generated planets was discovered every second, it would take around 584 billion years to log them all.

After a whirlwind three years Dean Hall has gone, left Bohemia, returned to New Zealand, started a new indie studio, walked away from day-to-DayZ. "Saying goodbye is like a mountain summit," he wrote on Twitter in December. "People focus on that, and forget that it is the journey there and then onward that really matters."

Now one man's creation is a team's responsibility, like Minecraft, and DayZ lives on, improving by the day. So who's in charge now? A collection of people.

"Dean was and always has been [not] so much a director as a screenwriter." An enthusiastic "cheerleader" for ideas, but, "The management of the project, as far as what gets worked on when, and how things are made, has always been the leads that Dean hired from the get go. Those people are still the people making the decisions."

At Splash Damage, the studio famed for its long line of competitive, collaborative shooters, there's always been an odd and irresistible blend of cockiness and nerdishness. When its founder and CEO Paul Wedgwood takes a group of journalists on a tour of its new studio, located within a newly gentrified area of the Bromley borders it's for so many years called home - "They've cobbled the streets and put in cast iron street lamps and made it harder to park," he says - he stops for a prolonged moment to bask in the glory of the company's vast banks of servers. Through all the jargon he spouts, you sense a great amount of pride in a developer that takes having fun very seriously.

The pride's not misplaced, either, and it's certainly backed up by so much of what Splash Damage has shipped. There are the early, fondly remembered mods and then the classics such as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Added to that are the likes of the more recent, slightly unsung contribution to Batman: Arkham Origins, or the well-received turn-based mobile game Rad Soldiers; all games given that coveted green number over on Metacritic.

And then there's Brink. It's the one blot against Splash Damage's name, the one time its Metacritic has sunk below 80, and still - to this day, over three years later - the game that most people associate the studio with.

Today is Tom Bramwell's last day at Eurogamer. The former editor-in-chief leaves after nearly 15 years at the company. We're all sad to see him go, but wish him well for the future, whatever it may hold.

During his time at Eurogamer, Tom reviewed countless video games, interviewed hundreds of developers and publishers, and even penned the odd column. He led the team as we travelled across the world, reporting on the likes of GDC, E3, Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show. He was the driving force behind Eurogamer's editorial direction, raising standards while setting the agenda. Oh, and he hired me, which, obviously, was his smartest move.

So, after so many years spent grilling the video game industry, we thought it would be fun to turn the tables on Tom and see how he'd like the hot seat. Why is he leaving Eurogamer? Has he ever been offered cash for a review score? And, of course, do you eat Doritos? Let's not pull any punches - after all, as we'd often say to each other as we'd head off to report on some event, "happy hunting."

Two years ago Sony Online Entertainment launched massively multiplayer online first-person shooter PlanetSide 2 on PC - and it's still going strong. It's a game where hundreds of players work together to complete objectives on huge battlefields. Soldiers jump around firing assault rifles as others pilot futuristic helicopters overhead. For PlanetSide 2's battles, big is definitely better. Eurogamer recently tried to work out just how big.

PlanetSide 2 is also a free-to-play game. Now, of course, free-to-play doesn't necessarily mean free. F2P almost always means in-game items for sale. This, we all know by now, is how these companies make their money. But for Sony Online Entertainment the trick is to balance having to satisfy the businessmen while satisfying the players. The studio has to keep the lights on. But if PlanetSide 2 were pay-to-win, then, simply, we wouldn't play at all.

And so, creative director Matt Higby tells Eurogamer in a sweeping interview looking back over PlanetSide 2's first two years of existence, SOE is "leaving money on the table". Some things it will sell, some things it will not. Keeping the money rolling as it improves and adds content to the game, manages the loyal and vocal PlanetSide community and develops the long-awaited PlayStation 4 version (how's that getting on, by the way?) has been tough. But, we discover, just a few tweets can make it all seem worthwhile.

The biggest bets in gaming are MMOs. They're games and persistent online services all in one, and they take longer, and cost more, than any other game to make. And then they're expected to grow and improve after launch. They're serious undertakings.

Take WildStar, the MMO released this summer from genre-specialist NCSoft: developer Carbine was formed nine years ago to create it. Years were spent building the tech foundations alone. Finally three game iterations later - including one about multiple dimensions - WildStar was released. 271 people were working on the game.

This wasn't a throwaway release; NCSoft must have poured many millions of dollars into the game. But when WildStar came out, well... you'd be forgiven for not noticing. Where were the headlines about success, about sales - or were they too low to talk about? Instead, WildStar found itself in headlines for having lots of bugs, for lay-offs at the studio and for Carbine cancelling traditional Halloween and Christmas game content amid more urgent concerns.

Is Halo 5's competitive multiplayer a drastic departure or a return to the series' roots? For me, having played the game for a few hours, it's a bit of both. Fresh and familiar, Guardians' PVP walks a fine line between giving Halo the kick up the arse it perhaps needs on Xbox One, and staying true to what made Bungie's seminal first-person shooter series so special.

People care. And so they should. Halo for so many of us is the console first-person shooter. Hours spent playing split-screen, or maybe online over the fledgling Xbox Live, or maybe both, getting up to no good, no-scoping that Sniper Rifle with the best of them.

Now, just under a year before Halo 5 comes out in time for Christmas 2015, we get a taste of its multiplayer. The beta looms over the horizon. Information is flooding, as much as video game information can flood from a carefully planned PR beat. So it feels like the right time to fuss over the fact that now, pressing the left trigger zooms in for all weapons, clicking the left stick starts unlimited sprint, and a press of the B button boost-dodges your Spartan in any direction. Best to dance now, while there's still time to react.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1719541Wed, 12 Nov 2014 08:00:00 +0000The man who made a game to change the world

There is no one agreed family tree of video games, arranged and pruned by consensus. There is no single progenitor that sits at the top of that tree, the seed from which all other video games originate.

The video-game family tree is knotted, tangled and grimly contested. We can all agree that Donkey Kong begat Super Mario Bros. But did the modern role playing games flow from Adventure, Wizardry or Black Onyx? Historians can't even agree on who first put a game onto a computer. There were, rather, multiple, dispersed inventors, people who eureka'd in darkened bellies of universities, where the comically large mainframe computers of the mid-20th century hummed with potential and electrical warmth.

One branch of the family tree, however, is different. This lineage is ordered and unchallenged. The modern MMO, those vast, complex online worlds where players can socialise and quest together, can be cleanly traced back through Wildstar, World of Warcraft, Everquest and all the way back to MUD, the primordial earth from which almost all virtual worlds sprouted. Richard Bartle, the 54-year-old co-creator of the game is unequivocal. "There is obviously a difference in style, but nevertheless, in the same way that the latest 3D movie today is fundamentally the same thing as a Charlie Chaplin short, so today's MMOs are MUDs," he says.

It was a disjointed, bizarre effort that made little sense. Exposition amounted to a short blurb from one of the game's few nonsensical characters as by-the-numbers story missions were loaded. The few cutscenes that did make the cut came across as cobbled together at the last moment, with instantly forgettable dialogue that made us clamour for the pre-release days of Peter "Tyrion" Dinklage's infamous "that wizard came from the moon!" line. And the less said about the text-based Grimoire cards, unhelpfully hosted outside of the game on Bungie.net, the better.

Why are we killing these aliens, a million Guardians wondered? I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain, Destiny answered.

Every week we present you an article from our archive - either for you to discover for the first time, or to get reacquainted with. This Sunday, in light of her departure from Ubisoft Toronto, we present Simon Parkin's profile of Jade Raymond, originally published in 2012.

Eight months pregnant with her first daughter, Jade Raymond received a call from her boss requesting she come to work for a meeting. "I knew that Ubisoft was establishing a new studio in Toronto, but I never imagined they would offer me the chance to run it," she says. "I always thought eventually I would like to start my own studio, but presumed it would be farther down the line. So yes, the offer came as something of a shock."

That was two years ago, time that Raymond has spent assembling a team of over 200 staff, many of whom joined her in the move from Ubisoft Montreal to work on the new studio's first announced project, Splinter Cell. For some women, pregnancy is an opportunity to press pause on a career. But for Raymond, childbearing has only served to heighten her passion towards her vocation. As we sit down to talk in San Francisco, she's six months pregnant with her second child. Nevertheless, her opening, impassioned call to arms for developers to find new meaning in games belies that fact just as effectively as her slender frame.

Every Sunday we bring you an article from our archive, either for you to discover again or enjoy for the first time. This week, to celebrate the release of The Evil Within, we present Simon Parkin's profile of its creator Shinji Mikami, first published last July.

Shinji Mikami sits down in a claustrophobic, makeshift room hidden at the very centre of the E3 video game conference floor in Los Angeles. It's a fitting place for the designer, whose work has, one way or another, influenced the majority of the blockbuster video games that flash and growl at the crowds outside the door. These games all carry third or fourth generation strains of Resident Evil 4's DNA. Arguably the designer's greatest creation, its over-the-shoulder viewpoint was subsequently adopted by games as diverse as Gears of War and Batman: Arkham Asylum, while its aiming system, which snaps the camera inwards to focus on enemy targets with a squeeze of the controller's trigger, is now an industry standard. Mikami's inventions, much like the man in this room, sit at the centre of blockbuster video game development today.

How does he feel, walking the show floor, catching familiar glimpses of his ideas reflected in other people's games? "Maybe I influenced them, maybe I didn't," he says. "But I don't really care about all that. I don't think about my influence in the industry. I just make games that I'm interested in." Mikami's nonchalance and swagger is warmer in person than in transcript. He smiles wryly throughout our conversation and, while his answers are often short and pointed, the eyes shine beneath the off-white baseball cap, inviting engagement. At 47 he has worked in video games for close to half his life, having joined Capcom after he graduated from Doshisha University at 25 years old. But all this Los Angeles stuff with the lights, the screens, the action, was never his ambition.

Every Sunday we present an article from our archive - giving you a chance to discover something for the first time, or maybe just to get reacquainted. This week, with the Conker-starring Project Spark finally releasing, we go back to Wes' interview with the man behind Rare's foul-mouthed mascot.

Chris Seavor left Rare in January 2011 after 17 years at the legendary UK developer. While there he worked on most of the studio's games: Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark and Banjo-Kazooie included. But he's best known for taking the cute Twelve Tales: Conker 64 and turning it into the profanity and poo packed N64 adventure Conker's Bad Fur Day - Rare's last game for a system that had never seen anything like it.

After the studio he so loved was bought by Microsoft he remade Conker's Bad Fur day for the Xbox. Conker: Live & Reloaded launched in 2005 with dumbed down content and Live-enabled multiplayer. We haven't seen a game in the series since.

Xbox One exclusive Sunset Overdrive is a little different. It's a shooter, but instead of firing realistic weapons from behind the safety of a waist-high wall, you're firing harpoons from a gun called Captain Ahab while grinding rails. This is a game where you have to keep moving to survive, not play whack-a-mole against enemies who conveniently poke their heads out of cover every few seconds. It rekindles memories of Jet Set Radio, that fantastic, much-loved Sega classic. Play it for five minutes and you'll see why.

At EGX this week Ted Price, the boss of developer Insomniac Games, sat down with Eurogamer to reveal why the studio wanted to do something different with the shooter genre after shipping gritty PlayStation 3 exclusive FPS Resistance 3 in 2011. There were a few bumps along the road to Sunset Overdrive's upcoming October 2014 launch, but it sounds like a fascinating journey.

Oh, and we asked a few questions from Eurogamer's dear readers, too (like, will Sunset Overdrive come to PC?). You lot really are lovely.

At EGX yesterday Frontier boss David Braben delivered a developer session on Elite: Dangerous, the space game currently in beta and due out before the end of 2014. In it he talked passionately about spaceships, player politics and a virtual galaxy packed with billions of stars.

This morning I sat down with Braben - in the relative peace and quiet of the calm before the EGX storm - to follow up on a few of his points. He reckons gaming has gone stale, so will Elite: Dangerous have the same effect as the original, released a sobering 30 years ago, and freshen things up? And what about those console versions? And pesky publishers - surely a few have been in touch, right? And what's the vision for Oculus Rift support?

Oh, and of course I put a few of your questions (thank you dear Eurogamer readers, you're the best) to the man in the hotseat. Want to know what the biggest ship in Elite: Dangerous will be? Strap yourself in - it's time for forward thrust.

Final Fantasy has never been short of characters burdened with saving the world, but there's something different about its new breed of heroes. When Naoki Yoshida was tasked with salvaging the mess that was the original release of Final Fantasy 14, the challenge seemed insurmountable. With A Realm Reborn, it's a feat he pulled off, and with some style: the rebirth of the once troubled game has done more than rescue an expensive, wayward project. It's restored faith in Square Enix, and in a series that for too many years seems to have drifted away from its audience.

Now, a similarly herculean task has fallen at the feat of another employee of Square Enix. Hajime Tabata, the director who previously worked on Final Fantasy 7 offshoots Before Crisis and Crisis Core as well as, most recently, Type 0, has been given responsibility to deliver the project that's haunted Square Enix for over eight years. It's fallen to Tabata to deliver Final Fantasy 15, the game born from the development hell that enshrouded Final Fantasy Versus 13, with former director Tetsuya Nomura having been moved aside to focus on Kingdom Hearts 3.

Having sat down with Tabata for an hour-long roundtable at Square Enix's Shinjuku headquarters, it seems he is the perfect man for the job. Like Yoshida, Tabata cuts a contrasting figure to the directors who have immediately preceded him. The Final Fantasy 13 era that staggered throughout the entirety of the last generation, though not without its own moments, felt defined by a stuffiness that, by the time of the second sequel, almost bordered on arrogance, the likes of Yoshinori Kitase and Motomu Toriyama seemingly deaf to Final Fantasy's many fans.

After its announcement on Microsoft's stage at E3 this year, it was hard to get much of a handle on Platinum Games' Scalebound, beyond it likely being a very good thing - especially for the Xbox One and its prospects in Japan and beyond. Listening to director Hideki Kamiya and producer Atsushi Inaba at a rushed roundtable at this year's Tokyo Game Show, I'm still not entirely sure what Scalebound is, though at least some of the idle speculation that's swirled around the game can have a little more direction now.

Kamiya and Inaba sit together in a hotel room beside a 50-inch TV displaying the Scalebound logo. That's all the TV is there for, though - there's no demo, no presentation and not even a recap of the trailer shown at E3 - leaving just a series of vague answers on what shape Scalebound will take.

Perhaps the most revealing is that this will be a different type of game for Platinum Games, a step or two removed from the slick, fast-paced and hard-edged action of Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and The Wonderful 101. "The main characteristics of the games I've put out require reflexes, intuitiveness," says Kamiya. "It might seem like they're more for advanced and skilled players. How does that change if we've got these gigantic beasts and monsters. It's not really that plus the monsters - that's not how I'm looking at it.

Glen Schofield is a tank of a man. The kind you'd expect to make floorboards quake, the type of person you'd conjure up in your mind if you were ever asked to picture the talent behind Call of Duty; strong, direct, American. And he makes his entrance into Sledgehammer Games' presentation theatre on an oversized scooter, playfully crashing into colleague and studio co-founder Michael Condrey, waving to the room with the sunbeam smile of a children's entertainer. Maybe he's not quite what you'd imagine of a Call of Duty developer after all.

Sledgehammer Games likes to make a habit of subverting expectations, you suspect. It's the studio set up to explore new directions for the Call of Duty series, at first building a third-person, horror-tinged take on the Vietnam war that leant heavily on its prior work on Dead Space. Then it was the studio that came to the aid of Infinity Ward during the messy departure of its founders, delivering Modern Warfare 3 - and what was, soon after its release, the greatest-selling entertainment product of all time - in little over 18 months. Now it's the studio that's about to pull Call of Duty out of its groove - or, to put it a little less politely, its rut - and inject new life into what's recently felt like something of a tired franchise.

At the heart of Sledgehammer are Schofield and Condrey, a pair who first met at EA's Redwood Shores' studio when they were working on the Bond franchise, producing games such as Agent Under Fire, Everything or Nothing and From Russia With Love. There's a spark between them that comes from having worked so closely together for well over a decade, the crackle of putdowns and quick quips that makes an audience with them feel like you're with games development's very own odd couple.

The deal means adverts for Destiny feature PlayStation 4 marketing only. Last week we saw Xbox UK playfully dig at the situation with its cheeky Destiny fragrance ad. "Okay, so here's the lowdown. Destiny is actually an epic new first-person shooter, available on Xbox," the site's text reads. "Thing is, we didn't have permission to run adverts for the game.

A year ago I told Palmer Luckey's story, about how he'd invented what would become Oculus Rift in his parent's garage. He was the boy wonder swept up in a rollercoaster of success after John Carmack demoed his VR headset at E3 2012. Zoom went the Kickstarter campaign; zoom went the flood of excited, experimental game support; zoom went the increasingly massive piles of money raised by investors. A year later he was a millionaire, and now, two years later, he's a multi-multi-millionaire, his company acquired by one of the biggest around, Facebook, and for a staggering $2bn.

It's against that backdrop I meet him face-to-face at Gamescom 2014, and I have lots of questions. I worry Facebook has changed Oculus' priorities and that games - those things so responsible for putting Rift on the map - are no longer the reason for being, the prime concern. I worry Palmer Luckey is drifting with Oculus VR into a sea of money, on a boat stuffed with well dressed corporate clones who shave each morning and smell... neat. Bye bye games, thanks for the lift.

It's encouraging Luckey is here at all, mind you, at a games show half-way across the world for him. And when I emerge an hour later I also feel reassured; Luckey and his co-host, co-founder Nate Mitchell, are genial and generous with their time, and they're making all the right noises. Those noises I've loosely grouped into topics below.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1704532Wed, 03 Sep 2014 11:00:00 +0100Metro Redux: what it's really like to develop for PS4 and Xbox One

As tech interviews go, this one's a corker. Readers of our previous Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light tech Q&As will know that 4A Games' chief technical officer Oles Shishkovstov isn't backward about coming forward on the matters that are important to him, and in the transition across to the new wave of console hardware, clearly there are plenty of important topics to discuss.

And it's this frankness and direct, to the point honesty that always makes Oles' interviews so refreshing. In this case, 4A is the first developer willing to talk in-depth and on the record about the process of developing for the new consoles, discussing the problems and opportunities represented by the hardware and software that powers PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Oles illuminates points that were previously the subject of rumour and hearsay, painting a picture of the challenges that face Xbox One game-makers in particular, offering us a glimpse of how Microsoft is working behind the scenes to improve the development XDK.

There's a wealth of information to sink your teeth into - the performance differential between Xbox One and PlayStation 4 of course, a frank and honest assessment of the Microsoft console's ESRAM, the implications of both CPU and GPU sharing the same memory space (and bandwidth), and observations on PC hardware and DirectX 12. There are some revelations too. Did you know that Microsoft now allows developers to bypass DX11 and talk to the hardware directly in the similar manner to Sony's GNM API? And just how much of a big deal is the return of the Kinect GPU time-slice to developers?

The recent Destiny beta left developer Bungie with mountains of feedback and more hard data than it could possibly hope to digest. But it's trying.

After the 4.8 million players who got stuck in to the online first-person shooter laid down their weapons, Bungie had questions to answer. For the first time Destiny had bared its soul, and we all had our say on what we saw. Like, for example, why limit raids to just six players? And why can they only be played with friends? Oh, and why is the game limited to just one area on each of the four worlds included at launch? And what's up with the level cap? Just how high can you go?

At Gamescom we sat down with director of production Jonty Barnes and lead concept artist Jesse van Dijk to put these questions, and more, to Bungie.

It's been a fantastic year for Sony and the PlayStation 4, with a whopping 10m consoles sold. But there have been bumps along the road.

The Last Guardian remains missing in action years after it was announced. It's been in development for so long it's becoming a bit of a running joke.

There's also the issue of the delay to Evolution's racing game DriveClub. It was once due out alongside the PS4 in November 2013. Now, it'll launch almost a year later, going up against the likes of Forza Horizon 2, Project Cars and The Crew.

It dominated last week's Gamescom and sparked thousands of comments on the internet.

In the 24 hours after Microsoft announced Xbox exclusivity for Rise of the Tomb Raider, forums raged. How could publisher Square Enix and developer Crystal Dynamics sell out? And wouldn't moneybags Microsoft be better off spending its cash on making its own games, rather than denying PlayStation and PC gamers the chance to play what will probably be one of 2015's biggest games?

All throughout there was a nagging feeling that Rise of the Tomb Raider wouldn't be exclusive to Xbox for all time after all, and that had to do with the wording of Microsoft's messaging: "Rise of the Tomb Raider, coming Holiday 2015, exclusive to Xbox."

In fact, we've heard developers at the company's vast network of studios, who are responsible for the likes of first-person shooter Crysis, gory action game Ryse and, as of a month ago, Homefront: The Revolution, first noticed something was up as early as 2012.

In late 2011, while on a business trip to Singapore, Brian Fargo gave a presentation to a room full of people about old-school role-playing games. As founder of Interplay, he'd worked on many: Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1 and 2. He had a lot to say.

The talk felt like a post-mortem. A lament. As a commercial exercise old school role-playing games were dead, he'd decided. But remembering what made them great was fun, in a warm, fuzzy, nostalgic kind of way.

Fast forward three years, and old school role-playing games are back with a bang. Larian's Divinity: Original Sin is still one of the top selling games on Steam a month after release, and players are loving it. There's huge excitement for Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity, the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and of course inXile's Wasteland 2, the sequel to the grandfather of post-apocalyptic role-playing games and the precursor to the Fallout series.

With Naughty Dog, you often get more than you asked for. When the Sony-affiliated Santa Monica developer set about creating a light-hearted jaunt for the PlayStation 3 with Uncharted, it created a dynamic and impressively filmic brand of interactive action. As the last generation came to an end and it set about a fusion of the survival horror of Resident Evil 4 with the emotional heart of Ico, it flourished a post apocalyptic genre piece with a tale of human warmth: a story about adolescence interrupted, adulthood and parental responsibility, as well as the countless lies we tell each other every day just in order to survive.

So it's no surprise that a one-on-one interview with The Last of Us' game director blossoms into something else. When Bruce Straley strolls into the Sony lobby he's flanked by both his cohort, creative director Neil Druckmann, and Naughty Dog's co-president Evan Wells. The three are together in London ahead of this year's BAFTA awards, at which The Last of Us would go on to win five awards, including the top honour of best game. It's one of many remarkable achievements in what's been an incredible year for the game, culminating in the release of the Remastered PS4 version this week.

You suspect that to have been awarded in the same forum that has honoured the likes of Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick and Powell and Pressburger in the past must have had a special resonance for Naughty Dog. The story of the developer since the turn of the century has been of it reaching for a new blend of cinema and games, where human stories told with Hollywood production values propel players' interactions with lush digital worlds.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1697054Thu, 31 Jul 2014 14:00:00 +0100Underworld Ascension: The game that took 20 years to sign

Role-playing games changed forever when Ultima Underworld launched in 1992. Here was a first-person adventure set in a fully 3D simulated world - an experience like possibly no other before. Skyrim takes all the glory today but The Elder Scrolls series was still two years from appearing on shelves back then. And it's not just Bethesda's games that were inspired by Underworld: prolific and celebrated designers such as Ken Levine, Warren Spector and Richard Garriott all highly regard it - and the man in charge of Underworld, Paul Neurath, worked with most of them. Now all of a sudden he's back - and so is Underworld.

Neurath is making a new game called Underworld Ascension, a project he got the surprise nod from brand holder EA to go ahead with not long before it was announced at the beginning of July. "It was a surprise to us," Neurath tells me in an interview. "EA had the rights and I'd been having discussions with them going back 20 years about doing a new Underworld. And finally the stars aligned and I was able to get the rights to be able to move forward with the franchise."

He doesn't have the go-ahead to use the Ultima licence, he clarifies, but the original Underworld game was designed without Ultima in mind, and having no fiction to adhere to may grant more creative freedom anyway.

Criterion is in a state. The once mighty Guildford studio has been hobbled by the transferral of the Need for Speed series to the Gothenburg-based Ghost Games, as well as the departure of its racing-focussed staff who formed Ghost UK and, more pertinently, the departure of two of its founding members, Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry.

Or, Criterion is in the best place it's been for years. Stripped down to a core team of 25, its office stripped of corporate clutter and instilled with an easy-going, creative feel, it's returned to the independent spirit that birthed the Burnout games - and in its all-new IP, it's about to embark on its most significant game since the arcade racer that forged its reputation.

Which one of these to believe? Matt Webster, a long-time employee at Criterion who was appointed its general manager earlier this year, makes a strong case for the latter, of course. Criterion, he says, hasn't lost its spirit. It hasn't lost what's made it a success in a past. "When you make games, it's a team game," he says of the departure of the outspoken Alex Ward, a fiery character often identified as the heart of the studio. "It can't ever just be one person. The spirit of Criterion is not just defined by one person - it's the people who are in it. It's different for sure."

In the corner of Jason Kingsley's office sits a suit of armour. It's not quite shining; having been put to practical use by the co-founder of Sniper Elite 3 developer Rebellion when he first decided to take up jousting around five years ago, it's as weathered and beaten as the large, chilly warehouse on an Oxford industrial estate the developer calls home. But it's a perfectly anachronistic prop to find in this perfectly anachronistic studio - an indie with hundreds of employees, and a developer that's endured for well over 20 years without ever finding much in the way of critical success.

You'll know Rebellion from modern classics such as Rogue Warrior ("best described as disastrous"), Alien vs. Predator ("a deeply disappointing effort") or perhaps even NeverDead (which came complete with "a lingering sense of cheapness"). Yet the reviews tell half the story - Rogue Warrior was probably the greatest 2/10 of its generation, its credits sequence destined to live on through countless YouTube playthroughs long after memories of other, more celebrated games have flittered away, while games like NeverDead complement their flaws with a unique, endearing sense of character. "It's plucky, warm-hearted and genuinely idiosyncratic," wrote Chris Donlan in his review. "How often can you say that about a shooter these days?"

Rebellion isn't exactly blind to its reputation. "To a certain extent, our games are loved more by the audience that plays them than they're loved by the professional reviewer," says Kingsley. "We seem to, if you look at some of the aggregation sites, do better with user reviews than we do with professional reviews. I think if we get fairly criticised, and constructively criticised by professional reviewers, then, whilst it's hard to sometimes take criticism for something you've worked on for a couple of years, that's fine. And I'd defend everybody's right to say whatever the hell they like about my games."

Relic Entertainment has a five-year plan for World War 2 real-time strategy game Company of Heroes 2, a plan that includes a raft of expansions, updates and - potentially - new armies.

The successful launch of the game established COH2 as a platform, Relic says, which can be used to release new content to its loyal, active audience for years to come. It's all part of this transition we hear so many developers talk about: to games as a service.

Relic has already released 20 updates for COH2 (at the same point in COH1's life it had released eight). But the game's first major expansion arrives with next month's launch of the standalone multiplayer The Western Front Armies, which Relic has been working on since COH2 released in June 2013. It adds two new armies, the US Forces and the German Oberkommando West, eight new maps and, crucially for multiplayer enthusiasts, new strategies.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1680936Thu, 29 May 2014 16:00:00 +0100Richard Garfield: King of the cards

Richard Garfield doesn't remember much about the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. It was a bloody conflict, which caused the displacement of millions of refugees and presented an ongoing threat of violence to his family, who had moved to the country for Garfield's father's job as an architect.

"As a child, I never felt threatened," he says. "But I think my parents were pretty worried. There were executions occurring and a lot of violence.

"We were pawns in a game being played. The government wouldn't let us go, then the United States' Government demanded we were let go, and so on. It was hectic."

Sony has announced the next SingStar game - and it lets you use your phone as a mic.

SingStar Ultimate Party launches in time for Christmas this year for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3, courtesy of long-standing SingStar developer Sony London, and its headline new feature is a free app that turns an iOS or Android device into a microphone.

After you've downloaded the app, you need to make sure your device - iPhone, Android phone, tablet or even iPod - is connected to the same wi-fi network as your PS3 or PS4. Then, you will receive a four digit code. Type it in and you're good to go.

Guerrilla Games is busy working on a significant four-player co-op expansion to its PlayStation 4 launch title Killzone Shadow Fall - but it's also busy working on its secret next effort on the console.

According to the Dutch developer, its next game will benefit from its creators having had plenty of experience with the finished version of Sony's console. It was a different case, of course, with Shadow Fall.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Guerrilla producer Poria Torkan said making a PS4 launch title was particularly difficult because the developer was working with ever-changing hardware and software - even though, as a Sony-owned studio, it was as close to the console as could be expected.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1678201Mon, 19 May 2014 14:00:00 +0100Lumo, a new game from Ruffian's co-founder, is truly enchanting

"I needed something to make the water look more evil," Gareth Noyce says as he talks through what constitutes work for him right now. "Then I forgot to take the collision off, and I was jumping off the water and noticed I bounced right off of it - and I thought 'hello!'"

Noyce's first game as an independent, Lumo, is full of happy accidents like this, a chance occurrence that ended up as a full-blown mechanic which gently nods towards the classic Bubble Bobble. It's a game hazily woven together from various influences: the isometric adventures of Jon Ritman loom large, and it's easy to see the spirit of Head Over Heels in the chunky charismatic art.

Lumo's a game conceived through a happy accident, too. Noyce, who had not long left Crackdown 2 developer Ruffian - a company he helped found - was having a drunken Twitter conversation with prolific developer Ste Pickford, who pointed him towards speed-runs of the SNES action-puzzler Equinox and suggested he should have a go at making his own take on a genre that's been neglected over time.

With the arrival of a new Trials game, it's the Digital Foundry tradition to accompany the launch with an in-depth tech interview with RedLynx's tech mastermind, lead graphics programmer Sebastian Aaltonen - aka sebbbi. Whereas previous interviews have concentrated on how RedLynx coaxed stunning effects, physics and performance from Xbox 360 hardware, the topic of conversation shifts somewhat here: Trials Fusion is the studio's first simultaneous release, multi-platform project - and a cross-generation game to boot.

Here we'll learn how RedLynx prototyped the new game, what the new consoles add to the mix and how the company approached the Xbox 360 version of the game. There's also an in-depth conversation on the thorny subject of the Xbox One's 32MB of ESRAM - does optimising a game for the seemingly meagre amount of available scratchpad memory actually hold back developers from getting the most out of PS4 and PC versions of the game? And what's the score with games that run at 720p on Xbox One and 1080p on PlayStation 4? You'll find out here. On top of that, we talk Mantle, DirectX 12, GPU compute and much, much more.

But before we begin, a quick clarification - these deep-dive interviews aren't easy to arrange - and to provide the kind of depth we strive for, they often need to be set-up way ahead of time. In the case of Trials Fusion, questions were submitted to RedLynx before the Xbox One 800p to 900p patch was common knowledge, and before we'd seen any of the console versions of the game. However, we did get some hands-on time with the game via the PC beta. You can read our full thoughts in the final game in our recently published four-way Face-Off.

Remember the contract between Activision and Bungie for Destiny, published in 2012 as part of the lawsuit between Activision and Call of Duty creators Jason West and Vince Zampella? It said Destiny would launch in the autumn of 2013 as a timed Xbox exclusive.

MOBAs - or "online team brawlers", as Blizzard likes to call them, because every developer seems to feel the need to invent its own blanket term for these games - are the biggest games in the world, with one big problem. League of Legends and Dota 2 are fast-paced, skilful competitive games with great tactical depth, gigantic followings and a thriving eSports scene that can turn young players into stars. But they're not very nice places to be, especially for newcomers.

Of course, high tension and aggression go with the territory in a team sport, but MOBAs suffer in particular because they require coordinated teamwork across long, complex scenarios, yet they also encourage showboating and intra-team competitiveness. Combine this volatile mixture with the general standard of manners on the internet and you get a poisonous online environment where less skilled and experienced players - or even skilled and experienced players who are just having an off day - are cussed, humiliated and browbeaten with dispiriting relentlessness.

"We're not shy about this problem," says Dustin Browder down a crackly phone line from California. "I've joked with the team about removing team chat altogether - that was a less than popular idea! But we will keep attacking this problem until it's gone, or as gone as we can get it."

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1673954Thu, 01 May 2014 14:00:00 +0100Wolfenstein's New Order: How MachineGames is resurrecting a classic

Jens Matthies is feeling a little flat. It's not that he's unhappy with his lot, or with the work put in by his team at MachineGames, the Swedish studio based in the city of Uppsala that's finishing up on its first ever project, Wolfenstein: The New Order. It's that Matthies' active role on the game is complete, and a journey that's spanned some five years is at last winding towards its conclusion.

"It feels a little empty when it's all done," says Matthies, who served as an art director at Starbreeze before splintering off with six of his co-workers to found MachineGames. "But it's also something you've been looking forward to for a long time. So it's happy, and it's a little sad at the same time."

Matthies' time at Starbreeze saw happiness tinged with sadness, though not always for the best of reasons. The Stockholm developer built up a reputation for visually stunning, mechanically robust first-person shooters off the back of 2004's The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, a reputation upheld by the stylish, smart comic adaptation The Darkness. Things weren't quite so sweet, however, during an at times turbulent partnership with EA: one project based on the Jason Bourne licence was cancelled outright while another, what would become the 2012 reboot of Syndicate, failed to deliver on its potential.

On 27th August 2013 Naoki Yoshida, over-worked, overtired and twitching on caffeine, paced backstage at a press conference in Shibuya, Tokyo. In a few minutes he was due to proclaim the arrival of Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn to the world in a live broadcast. It should have been a happy moment, yet Yoshida felt nothing but nausea.

Big budget video game development can be a traumatic experience. A blockbuster game's gestation is, after the initial thrill and excitement of conception, long, gruelling and problematic. The final push of delivery is painful; the team is up all night (the word for these prolonged hours, "crunch", bespeaks unbearable pressure) and, when the game finally emerges into the world, spent.

Yoshida's experience was especially traumatic. Final Fantasy 14's original launch in 2010 had been a multi-million dollar flop, a massively multiplayer online RPG that launched prematurely and in a broken state. The president of Square Enix, the game's publisher, said it had "greatly damaged" the Final Fantasy brand. For three years Yoshida's job had been to work to undo this damage, to ready the realm for a rebirth. He had carried the weight of a world on his shoulders.

If 2013 was King's year - when you couldn't walk through a train carriage without seeing half the commuters busily tapping away at mobile phenomenon Candy Crush Saga - then 2014's been the year when the dream has perhaps soured slightly, a swell of controversies ensuring the Swedish developer has never been far from the headlines.

Over the past few months King has become - thanks to some aggressive trademark protection as well as a general disdain for free-to-play gaming from several quarters - the pantomime villains of the industry. "It got like that pretty fast," King's 'games guru' Tommy Palm tells us on a makeshift farm constructed outside Canary Wharf station to promote Farm Heroes Saga, one of the developer's several successful properties. "It's not the case, of course. We have a lot of really talented people who have worked with games for a really long time. I think we saw it for what it was, and continued doing what we do well."

What King does well - and what it's been doing, to a good level of success, for over a decade - is make the kind of sticky, addictive casual game that consumes commutes, evenings and entire weekends. Candy Crush Saga wasn't the first, but it has certainly been the most successful. "It's the game I've played and enjoyed most over the last 12 months," wrote Ellie Gibson last December as she named it her game of 2013. "Maybe it's not yours," she continued. "But I'm OK with that."

Having brought games like God of War, Metal Gear, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus from PS2 to last-gen consoles, Bluepoint Games has established itself as the go-to studio for high-quality HD remasters. But its latest project is something entirely different: Titanfall - a next-gen console title built without last-gen hardware in mind - has effectively been demastered to run on Xbox 360.

We've covered the last-gen version extensively over the week, and it's safe to say that we're impressed. Bluepoint appears to have made the best possible trades in porting the Xbox One/PC codebase over to the 360, retaining the core gameplay, the low-latency controls and the bulk of the game's audio-visuals.

What's clear is that there's a fascinating technological tale to tell here. We wanted to know how Bluepoint got the job, how it managed to squeeze a 5GB game into just 512MB of memory, how the project was managed alongside the Xbox One and PC versions, and the ways in which the game was adapted to cope on the older hardware.

For more than 500 years, the swipe of Komine Castle's rooftops provided the dominant silhouette on the city of Shirakawa's skyline, a chunky arrow pointed towards the heavens. The castle was ruined in 1868, burned to the ground during the Battle of Aizu. The city mourned its loss for generations.

But not Koji Igarashi, who was born exactly one hundred years after the bloody siege. He would gaze at the ruins from his bedroom window. For this young boy, the castle's appeal wasn't in the historical secrets buried beneath the undergrowth, but in the promise of contemporary adventures to be found amongst its rubble.

When he was a teenager, Igarashi was given a cheap camcorder by his parents. It was the impetus he needed. He broke into the ruined castle's grounds and filmed what he saw. He would return there most mornings, each time questing a little farther into its derelict mystery. It wouldn't be the last time that Igarashi returned to an abandoned castle to unearth a new adventure.

Gollop created XCOM - not the recent, superb remake from Civilization developer Firaxis - the original, the game that makes me feel a little tired when I realise it's 20 years old.

It was a game that, for some, perfected turn-based strategy. It influenced so many who played it, and so many who would go on to make games themselves, including Jake Solomon, the lead designer of the remake. The softly-spoken British designer's done well for himself, then. He's left his mark.

For all the noise around virtual reality recently - for reasons good and bad - it's easy to forget we've yet to really see any serious-minded, dedicated games emerge for any of the systems. There are demos, patched-in support and exciting little rollercoaster rides, but if it really is the future of gaming then you might be wondering where the more traditional games are by now.

All of which has left CCP's Eve Valkyrie, a project that began as an experiment at the Eve developer's Newcastle studio, as the unlikely poster child for this bold vision of the future, for now at least. It's a poster child for both Oculus and Morpheus, too, with Valkyrie playable exclusively on PC with the Rift and to be available on PS4 via Sony's in-development headset, a position of some pressure on a relatively small team.

"Part of the pressure on us on being early pioneers on the VR systems is putting our necks out there to a certain extent and saying we believe this is important," says David Reid, CCP's chief marketing officer. "The fact that Sony's entering the business alongside Oculus, it just adds that much more credence and validity that this could be a meaningful thing. But now the pressure is on us to do our job as an early developer on these platforms in the same way the responsibility's on Sony and Oculus to make great hardware and to get it out to the public and do the things that they need to do.

Jordan Amaro is a designer at Kojima Productions working on Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Mike Bithell is a designer working at home on Volume. Both are making stealth games, but both are taking radically different approaches.

Where Amaro is helping to create a systemic, open-world stealth game starring one of the most famous video game characters of all time, Bithell is the one-man band behind a linear, old-school stealth game that rekindles memories of Solid Snake's first adventure on PSone.

How has the stealth genre changed over the years? With the likes of Splinter Cell and Hitman going down a more action-orientated route, some fans of old-school sneaking have become disillusioned with the genre. But has stealth in fact changed for the better? Here, in a joint interview with Eurogamer, the pair discuss the current state of the stealth genre, dissect the design process of both Metal Gear Solid and Volume, and ask why accessible stealth is such a dirty term.